WiloStar3D Student Testimonial

Attention reader,
Below is a testimonial written by a former student from the early days of the school! It’s fantastic to see that our learning style of promoting creative thinking helped shape his future!

Back when Willostar was Willoway, around 2000 or 2001, I attended the class in their then-learning-world, The Palace. Willoway used this to great effect to teach us about all kinds of subjects as well as software design. I remember I created a Palace server that served as a Biology project presentation, and to make it work, I had to use Iptscrae, the programming language Palace provided to connect all the biology exhibits. Experiences like this taught me how to solve problems on my own using cross-discipline research and it was reflected in my later career.

I majored in Physics in college, but on the side, I sought out and interned for a NASA Planetary Geologist doing Java programming I’d picked up after school for fun. After college, I started my own gaming company and created a game that could teach children how to program. It garnered angel funding from Chicago angels.I eventually ended up in the Chicago start-up world, picking up first Ruby and then Javascript as a software developer. I started my own consultancy firm on the side of a full time job. Eventually, I ended up as a lead developer at Avant Credit.

All along the way, the skills that mattered most were my abilities to act as an independent actor with little input, and this is the exact skill any single Willoway assignment required. If it weren’t for my early experiences with cyberschool, I may not have become as independent as I needed to be to become a lead software engineer, running my own team and creating my own projects, then following through with them. Lots of people need to be told what to do, but thanks to Willoway, I was never one of them.